Adaptation technology for personalization in E-Learning systems

Abstract

Adaptation and personalization are being very important in the elearning systems currently. This situation arises due to the overloading and accessibility of learning material resources available offered by those systems. Aborting these characteristics, learner may found themselves lost in the cyberspace without achieving their goal or learning objectives. There are two reasons as stated by Brusilovsky(1996) to emphasize the importance of adaptivity in the field of e-learning. Firstly, due to the differences of learning goals, learning styles, preferences, knowledge and background among the learners that requires a different learning activity or content to be presented. Moreover, the profile of the learner must be updated because the knowledge level of the learner increases as the learning process continues. Secondly, an adaptive system can help the learner to navigate through a course by providing user specific learning experience. For example, the same content and presentation can be difficult to understand for a beginner but for an advanced leaner it is not important and boring (Brusilovsky, 1996). Hence, the factors of knowledge level and learner preferences for different learner that can be varied greatly require an e-learning system with the capability to be adaptive.